THE GREAT SCARLET POPPY.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 6122, 8 March 1898, Page 4

THE GREAT SCARLET POPPY.

» {The FleU.) Gardens have lately been brilliant with this very showy poppy, which is worth a place, and deserves to be artistically used, which is of much more importance in the case of this than of many other plants, owing to its rather short time in flower and vigorous habit. If we place it in good beds and borders, or near the house, which we want to be gay with things throughout the summer, it is a little in the way when out of flower. Tet there are few country places wheresofine a plant could not be well placed in shrubberies and less important borders, and even here and there in rich grass. Some years ago we put some in a loamy meadow, and it is in flower there now, but as the grass has to be mown in the usual time, it is not in the best situation, and a better one was found for it in making a hedge bank, where, having raised our bank in the usual way a couple of feet above the level of the ground and put in the usual prickly shrubs, we planted a number of spare roots of the great scarlet poppy in the back. They did well, and are now in handsome flower, and they get stronger year by year, as the soil is good and deep. The effect is novel, and the plants quite out of need of any gardening or other attention. These poppies are very easily increased by division, and, in fact, on rich warm valley soils they increase too rapidly, and are not easy to get rid of. Their vigour in this way is another reason why it is well to put them in rough places out of the garden proper. They are also easily raised from, seed, and various forms have been raised that way of recent years, but few of them so pretty or striking as the- old red kinds, P. orientalis and P. bracteata, not particularly distinct as botanical species, but from the garden point of view sufficientlyso.